From Food Production to Food Security - Global Environmental ...

Box 4 Stakeholder dialogue involving the NGO and business communities.Stakeholder dialogue can only thrive in an atmosphere of cooperation and mutual understanding,while serving the interests of the participants. There is always an aspect of power in dialogue.Certainly NGOs in stakeholder dialogue have to be able to exert such power in order to be takenseriously and to negotiate acceptable results. This power could be in the magnitude of theirconstituency, their high level relations, their press contacts or their cooperation with campaigningNGOs. NGOs are not, however, a monolithic entity. For example, ‘watchdog’ NGOs, of whichGreenpeace is perhaps the most well-known example, focus on agenda-setting for public opinion andopenly confront companies on their deemed bad behaviour. This is in contrast to ‘dialogue’ NGOs(e.g. World Wide Fund for Nature, WWF), which focus on cooperation with business and otherstakeholders in common analysis and finding common solutions.While companies may not fall into as many different categories as NGOs, there are clear differenceswithin the business sector. Who is actually representing the company or a group of companies canhave a strong bearing on what they are able to contribute to the dialogue and what subsequent actionsthey take. In general, public affairs managers are well trained in stakeholder dialogue, but can haveproblems with the acceptance of dialogue results within the company, while representatives frombusiness interest organizations have the responsibility to also take care of the less innovative of theirmembers. Research managers feel more comfortable with scientists than with NGO campaigners. Allthree kinds of professionals have their own multi-stakeholder networks. It is interesting to see thatthese groups of networks often have very limited overlap.When to engage stakeholders in research planningStakeholder engagement is important throughout the GEC–food security research process,not only for setting agendas. This is because the roles of non-research stakeholders include (i)identifying the problem; (ii) helping to formulate the research agenda; (iii) being sources ofinformation; (iv) being subjects of research; (v) being a target audience for dialogue on howto implement research results; (vi) implementing the research; and (vii) funding or cosponsoringthe research. Figure 2 gives a conceptual framework for organizing andunderstanding the complexity of stakeholder engagement organized around six interrelatedscience activities. These range from designing the research questions to communicating themessage. All stakeholders are represented by one of the ‘cards in the deck’, and the threedimensionaldepiction aims to capture the notion that multiple stakeholders can be involvedat various points along the six research stages.73